It’s often said that no one actor can hit all of Hamlet’s contradictions.
For Cumberbatch it’s a juggling act, one trait at a time, not Hamlet as a whole. His Elsinore, meanwhile, is a fairytale kingdom. Es Devlin’s grand, widescreen design, lit like sumptuous cinematography by Jane Cox, is a palatial stately home with military portraits and antique arms on the walls.
Children’s toys and leather books gather dust under the stairs. Silver branches and mounted stags adorn a vast wedding banquet. Hamlet sticks out, black blazer against white ceremonials, a student in a military state. Forbidden from returning to university, he sinks into a soliloquy and then throws a strop. His “madness” is actually mockery: marching on in a Napoleonic-era British Army uniform with a scornful salute to Ciarán Hinds’ upright Claudius. Denmark’s at war, and its kids are pathetically self-obsessed. Siân Brooke’s Ophelia runs into a WWII-style bunker to pester Jim Norton’s Polonius for romantic advice. Hamlet plays silly buggers in a giant children’s castle, then lugs on a model theater for a quaint, toothless “Mousetrap” with a cast of players like hippies and squatters. It’s as if Hamlet’s repeating the revolutions of the past - a futile, adolescent gesture that gets precisely nowhere. The world, meanwhile, teeters on the brink. With Fortinbras re-arming, war is imminent and Devlin brings it crashing into Elsinore. Suddenly, a prettified, dispassionate production gets a genuine kick - arguably too little, too late.
The symbols of the first half turn into visceral actions. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s Laertes runs in screaming hoarsely, gun-drawn. Brooke’s Ophelia sings with spine-tingling frailty.
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